Her house was a bigger, nicer version of the ones she’d been building by the hundred for their African friends. Aerogel walls that the rriksti, metaphorically rolling their eyes, had tinted on her orders to look like teak. Three open, airy rooms. Bedroom and kitchen in one. She peeked out into the living-room. Tralp stood guard in front of the door of her office, which was now the guest room. He saluted. Her family were safe inside.
She poured her coffee out of the French press into a Spode porcelain cup (more goodies from that Parisian spree) and sat cross-legged beside the drowsy Ripstiggr.
“Have we heard from Iristigut lately?”
Ripstiggr’s eyes sprang open. “I talked to him a couple of days ago. Why?”
“I was just thinking,” said the cunning Hannah. “Now we’ve got the cubesats in orbit, we don’t need his telescope observations anymore.”
“True,” Ripstiggr agreed. “But there’s a lot of good stuff coming out of the lunar mines. This planet is very short on useful minerals. We’ve got enough to eat but we need more for manufacturing. That Chinese delegation’s coming next week. Something might come of that. In the meantime, we still need Iristigut’s cargoes.”
The rriksti on the moon had been shipping REE minerals to Earth by firing containers to Sky Station, where the shuttles collected them.
“And Iristigut hasn’t done anything treacherous lately.” She sipped her coffee, unsure whether to be reassured.
“What can he do?” Ripstiggr laughed with his hair. “Africa—ours. Europe—we’re getting there. Asia—they’re falling over each other for our business. South America—who needs it? When we wipe out the diehards in the northern latitudes, the whole planet will be ours.”
“Until we crash the economy by flooding the gold market,” Hannah muttered.
“There’s always something rarer to use as currency,” Ripstiggr said comfortably. “And once again, that’s why we need Iristigut’s cargoes. In the long term, we’ll restore travel links with the moon and build arcologies on the equator. I don’t see him outliving his usefulness before then.”
Hannah felt slightly reassured. That, surely, was a long way off. She drank her strong, rich Ethiopian coffee, paid for with Congolese gold, which had been paid for with smart clingfilm and aerogel. Gusts of rain blew against the blinds. Frogs croaked outside. She was OK.
CHAPTER 22
Skyler sat on the bridge of the SoD while the rotating hab roared below him, gradually shaking itself to pieces. He figured it would last another few months.
“Hello?” he said. “Hello, hello?”
He had patched the Ku-band antenna and receiver from the junk room into the SoD’s dish. Pointed it at Earth. Fiddled with the tracking and polarization until—hallelujah! one day he heard a voice.
“Squids stay the fuck out of Denver. It is KNOWN that you are Zionist agents.”
Okayyyy.
At least the dish worked, so Skyler had kept scanning the bandwidth whenever he could get away from his duties, whenever North America was facing the moon. The good thing about working at the thorium reactor was that he was already outside the bunker. He didn’t have to log extra surface walks into the moronic new suit tracking system.
“Hello, Earth, hello …”
Maybe today he’d get the guy from Toronto, or the preppers in Oregon. Surprisingly, the number of random people in North America with handcrafted Ku dishes was not zero. And they all talked to each other on the internet. Before the coming of the Lightbringer, their raucous forums had specialized in conspiracy theories; now they had become clearing-houses for news about the alien invasion. Skyler awaited today’s war stories, real and fake, with eagerness and dread.
“Skyler?”
Stupidly, he looked around, his headlamp bouncing off the wreckage of the bridge. He was alone. In hard vacuum. The voice had come from Earth. But it was a voice he knew. The voice of a ghost …
“Skyler, you there?”
It couldn’t be.
“This is Trek.”
It was.
Skyler started to cry. “Here,” he gasped, embarrassed by his own reaction.
“Holy fuck, Skyler.” Cough, cough. “Dude, Earth is fucked. You can’t even get weed anymore.”
“Skyler, this is Piper. When are you coming home?”
“Skyler, this is Dad. Say something so we know you’re OK.”
“I’m OK,” Skyler said, grinning away his tears. “I’m OK, but what about you guys? How’s everything there?”
They told him.
*
After twenty minutes Skyler lost the signal. It happened. He turned off the radio, clambered down the keel tube, and descended to the floor of the spinning hab. He staggered back to Jack’s tent and plunged into the airlock. Jack raised his eyebrows. He was in the middle of doing deadlifts. He kept up his weightlifting, in addition to his shifts at the sewage plant, but he had let his garden die. The odor of decomposing leaves and rotten potatoes tainted the cold air in the tent.
Skyler crashed full-length on Jack’s sleeping-bag and doffed his suit to the neck. He rubbed at the slick of tears that had spread over his face beneath the smart material.
“Something the matter?” The barbell went up and down, up and down. 50 KG on each end.
“I was just talking to my brother.”
“What?”
“I have a younger brother. Trek. He has cystic fibrosis.”
“What’s that?”
“A genetic disease. Basically, one hundred percent of sufferers die by age 40. Trek’s twenty-eight.”
“You don’t have it, do you?”
“No, I’m just a carrier. That’s why I put salt on everything.”
“I did used to wonder about the salt thing. Who puts salt on carrots? Sorry to hear about your brother … but you can’t have been talking to him, Skyler. We’re on the moon.”
“I fixed the radio.”
Pause. “So it was you that took those parts.”
“Um. Yeah. I’ve been coming here off and on. Usually when you’re on shift. I talk to ham radio operators on Earth. Today I talked to my brother.”
Jack set the barbell down. “Did he say anything about the situation in the UK?”
Of course, Jack would be worried about his own family. Skyler felt like a heel. “Sorry, no. I’ll ask next time.”
“That would be great,” Jack said. He added sarcastically, “Thanks for telling me you’d got the radio working.”
“I wasn’t sure who else you’d tell,” Skyler said. He’d heard rumors about Jack and Linda Moskowitz.
“I’d have liked to … oh, never mind.” Jack towelled his face with a dirty t-shirt.
“You’ve been a total dick lately,” Skyler pursued.
“More than usual, you mean?” Jack smiled crookedly. “So what did your brother say? Let’s have it.” He pulled the t-shirt on and gazed at Skyler with tense expectancy.
“The Krijistal are in Boston. They waited until shortages, power cuts, and random violence had wrecked the infrastructure. Then they appeared like saviors. They’re using medical care to control the population. It’s stupidly brilliant. You know, there’s nothing people won’t do to save the lives of their loved ones.” Skyler felt tears coming on again. He stared up at the taut plastic ceiling.
“So they’re offering life-saving treatments to the sick … but your brother, who’s very sick, won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole?” Jack’s voice was gentler now.
“Yeah, how’d you know?”
“If he’s your brother, he’s got to be a bit like you.”
“Ha. I guess.” Skyler smiled distantly, thinking of Trek’s courage, hearing the wheezy breathing on the other end of the radio.
“So what else did he say?”
Skyler sighed. “Can I have that water, after all?”
Jack handed him his own mug. Skyler wet his throat. “It still disappoints me that you can’t tell the difference between billion-year-old water from comets,
and other people’s recycled piss.”
Jack was waiting.
“OK. Trek has 20/20 eyesight. His lung function is for shit, but his eyes are really good. He said that while we were gone he used to drive up the coast and look for Europa. He would cover Jupiter with a piece of card, and then he could see all the Galilean moons with his—his naked eye ... Sorry.”
Jeepers creepers. Thirty-three years old and crying like a baby at the thought of Trek standing on Singing Beach, searching the blackness for Europa. He ducked his head, scared that Jack would think him a wimp. The fear came like a reflex… and suddenly vanished, a paper monster falling apart. Fuck it. Jack already knew his wimpish inner self. He had nothing to hide. He smiled effortfully, wiping the tears away with his fingers.
“It’s OK,” Jack said. “It’s either laugh or cry, and sometimes you can’t laugh to save your life, can you? It’s fine.”
“Right. So Trek’s got good eyes, and a good pair of field binoculars. He watches the ISS and Sky Station from our garden. The light pollution in Boston is way down from what it used to be … Well, he’s seen the Lightbringer’s shuttles docking with our space stations.”
“Huh,” Jack breathed.
“When he first saw that, he got his internet buddies on the case. They recruited other people, you know how it goes. At this point, they’ve got eyes on the space stations pretty much round the globe. They’ve been able to track the shuttle flights, launch frequency, how long they spend at each station, etcetera.”
“Go on.”
“The Krijistal seem to be focusing on Sky Station. Thirty-eight flights have docked with it since Trek started watching in June.”
“That’s a lot.”
“Yeah. What do you figure they’re doing?”
“Repairing shit. Fixing the HERFed systems. Plussing up the water and reactant tanks. The question is, for what?”
“That is indeed the question. Six days ago, a shuttle docked with the station … and it never left. Jack, it’s still up there.”
CHAPTER 23
Jack pushed his handcart through the farm, casually glancing from side to side. At last he spotted Harry Windsor.
He parked the handcart in a spot near Harry, where the tree-sized runner bean plants would shield him from the overhead cameras. He began to spread soil around their roots.
Harry wandered over, cupping something in his hands. “How’s the gulag treating you?”
“Been worse,” Jack said. “Got a minute?” Harry was moving behind him. Before Jack could turn around, Harry twitched his coverall away from his neck. Something repulsively cool and wriggly slithered down his back. “Fuck!” Jack yelled.
Harry backed away, laughing. Jack tore his coverall open, ripped his t-shirt off, and danced. Several large, fat worms fell to the floor. They had been raised from egg cell cultures brought from Earth years ago. “Very amusing, Your Highness,” Jack said sternly, and then started sniggering himself at the thought of how his frenzied strip-tease must have looked.
“Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I think I’ll go and eat worms,” Harry sang as he returned the worms to the runner bean patch. “Big fat juicy ones, long thin skinny ones, see how they wriggle and squirm.” The old playground rhyme had sickening overtones, as worms had recently been tabled as a possible protein source.
Jack squatted down beside him. “I’ll be brief. Don’t respond, don’t say a word. The rriksti are at Sky Station. If we can make it that far, our chances of hijacking one of their shuttles are decent, in my opinion. That’s how we get back to Earth. We’ll need to kill a few rriksti but I think we can manage that.”
Harry leaned closer to hear over the noise of fans and irrigation pumps.
“Your mates work outside, don’t they? Tell them I’ll meet them at the thorium reactor for a talk. Tonight, if possible. It’s got to happen soon. There is no time to spare.”
The Krijistal might abandon Sky Station as inexplicably as they’d occupied it. The whole thing would be a gamble. But success depended on moving fast, in the sense that the longer they messed around getting their ducks in line, the likelier Coetzee would find them out.
*
At fifty-one, Colin McFarlane was too old to be patrolling across a lunar mountainside. Darkness hid the parched swells of rock on the anti-sunwards side of Shackleton Crater. His headlamp illuminated a small yellow oval ahead of him. His breath whispered in the silence. He’d come to hate the moon more than he ever hated the South American jungle, or the sandy wadis of the ME, or any of the other places where he’d operated during his 20-year career with the SAS. The moon was even worse than Wales—as he often said to Harry, Prince of.
His oxygen regulator hissed. His suit fan whirred, sucking the stale air out of his helmet. Push off, glide, land, push off. No need to use those thigh muscles, you great wally. Don’t think about the sub-zero cold waiting outside your suit, don’t think about the vacuum that’ll turn your lungs inside-out if you get a suit breach. Don’t think about Mary and the boys, back in Aberdeen. Think about the objective.
Ahead, a hillock stood in sunlight. Solar panels, raised on stalks like gleaming black flowers, tracked the sun. The darkness had crept to the bases of their masts, but would not reach the panels themselves until late evening, several days from now.
A bright orange Starliner climbed the hillock into the sunlight. That was Pete. He examined the ground, hand-signaled, pointed. Colin changed course and caught up with him at the cable leading away from the solar installation.
They loped into the darkness, following the cable through the darkness. It led them to the Moon Express.
They flashed their helmet lamps along the length of the 47-meter cylinder. Micro-impacts had scarred its white paint and CELL logo. A coating of moon dust underlined the fact that the craft had been sitting here neglected for almost a year.
“If this thing still flies, I’m a donkey’s uncle,” Pete said, breaking their silence.
“Only one way to find out,” Colin said. He took the temperature gun from his belt. He had a reason to have it on him. Used it for servicing the mining robots, down in the crater. He scuffled to the rear of the Moon Express, located the external valve cap of the old LOX tank. It had been partitioned to hold fuel for the titchy little engines attached to the old SRB mounts.
Pete boosted him up. he aimed the temperature gun’s sensor at the fuel tank.
“Score!”
“Minus two hundred and ten.”
“Means there’s cryogenic propellant in there.” Colin chuckled, his spirits improving now that the first hurdle had been cleared. “They left the fuel in the tank.”
“That won’t do us much good if they took the keys out of the ignition.”
“It’s a fucking spaceship, it hasn’t got keys.”
Jack Kildare had given them a list of things to check. They climbed the steps to the door halfway along the Moon Express. It opened smoothly. They slid into the darkness of the intertank space between the fuel tank and the forward tank, which had once held liquid hydrogen. Now it held cargo restraints and room for thirty people to travel in ‘comfort’ approximating standard class on the Caledonian Sleeper. From that flying tomb Colin had emerged onto the moon, a year and a half ago—and wished, as soon as his boots touched the lunar rock, that he could turn around and go back. You’ve got to go, Dad! his boys had said. It’s the moon! In their eyes, he would’ve been mad to say no. But in reality, he’d been mad to come.
The only silver lining was that the heir to the throne remained alive. The moon, ironically, may have saved the House of Windsor.
And if those nuclear subs were still berthed at Clyde, the House of Windsor might yet save Earth.
But first they had to get the hell off the moon, so Colin and Pete climbed the ladder around the inside of the Moon Express to the pilot’s cabin, which sat on top of the craft like a howdah on an elephant’s back. The airlock opened without a delay. No pressurization. The dashboard consoles lit
up at the swipe of touch-sensitive gloves. The trickle of power from the solar installation kept fragile machinery ticking over in the Goldilocks zone, not too hot, not too cold.
Pete read out the items from Kildare’s checklist, written in the margins of a page torn from a Spirit of Destiny technical manual. Colin searched for buttons, squinted at indicators. How did anyone ever fly this thing? It was like being inside one of his eldest son’s video games. “OK … OK.” Item after item checked out.
“Engine ignition system. Runs on TEB, that’s triethylborane. Check TEB level.”
TEB, TEB. Colin directed his headlamp onto the indicator. “Oh, no.”
“What?”
“They did take the fucking keys out of the fucking ignition. There’s no TE-bloody-B. Not a drop. And according to Kildare, the engines won’t start without it.” Colin felt like smashing the console with his fist. “It was a nice idea, but this bird’s not going anywhere.”
*
“Oh yes it is,” Jack said. “Leave it to me. I’ll just need some of that powdered phosphorus from the KREEP mine, the stuff we use for fertilizer.”
As he explained how he’d rig a replacement ignition system, brain cells stultified by the sewage plant sprang back into SoD problem-solving mode. Maybe this was what he was born to do. The essence of spaceflight, after all, is not flying into space, but staying alive once you’re out there.
Colin and Pete nodded, tentatively accepting that he could make it work. They had the single worst job at CELL: they were on the team that descended into Shackleton Crater when the lousy rotten robot tow truck couldn’t attach its tow cable to one of the lousy rotten mining robots. That was how they’d pulled off their trip to the Moon Express. Down into the crater, cross the crater floor to the other side. Dead reckoning in temperatures as low as -250°. Jack did not think he could have done it. “Took bloody hours to fix that damn robot,” was all Colin had said about their trek, winking.
They’d met on the tyre-tracked route back from the waterworks, a prearranged ‘chance’ encounter, out of the bunker’s wireless range. The comms chips had roughly the same range as rriksti bio-antennas—2 klicks at best. The rrikstis’ unwillingness to give the humans better bio-radio than they had themselves created several holes in the CELL surveillance system; this was one of them.
Killshot: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 4) Page 16